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Published March 2003 | Published + Submitted
Journal Article Open

Near-Infrared Observations of Powerful High-Redshift Radio Galaxies: 4C 40.36 and 4C 39.37

Abstract

We present near-infrared imaging and spectroscopic observations of two Fanaroff-Riley type II high-redshift radio galaxies (HzRGs), 4C 40.36 (z = 2.3) and 4C 39.37 (z = 3.2), obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck and Hale Telescopes. High-resolution images were taken with filters both in and out of strong emission lines, and together with the spectroscopic data, the properties of the line and continuum emissions were carefully analyzed. Our analysis of 4C 40.36 and 4C 39.37 shows that strong emission lines (e.g., [O III] λ5007 and Hα+[N II]) contribute to the broadband fluxes much more significantly than previously estimated (80% vs. 20%–40%) and that when the continuum sources are imaged through line-free filters, they show an extremely compact morphology with a high surface brightness. If we use the R^(1/4)-law parameterization, their effective radii (r_e) are only 2h_(50)^(-1) to 3h_(50)^(-1) kpc, while their rest-frame B-band surface brightnesses at r_e are I_e(B) ~ 18 mag arcsec^(-2). Compared with z ~ 1 3CR radio galaxies, the former is 3–5 times smaller, while the latter is 1–1.5 mag brighter than what is predicted from the I_e(B)-r_e correlation. Although exponential profiles produce equally good fits for 4C 40.36 and 4C 39.37, this clearly indicates that with respect to the z ~ 1 3CR radio galaxies, the light distribution of these two HzRGs is much more centrally concentrated. Spectroscopically, 4C 40.36 shows a flat (f_ν = const.) continuum, while 4C 39.37 shows a spectrum as red as that of a local giant elliptical galaxy. Although this difference may be explained in terms of a varying degree of star formation, the similarities of their surface brightness profiles and the submillimeter detection of 4C 39.37 might suggest that the intrinsic spectra is equally blue (young stars or an active galactic nuclei) and that the difference is the amount of reddening.

Additional Information

© 2003. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2002 September 30. Accepted 2002 December 3. We thank Aronne Merrelli for comments on the manuscript. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Mauna Kea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Support for proposal 7860 was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. B.T.S. and E.E. were supported by grants from the NSF and NASA, and B.T.S. and L.A. are supported by the SIRTF Science Center at Caltech. SIRTF is carried out at J.P.L., operated by Caltech under an agreement with NASA. A.S.E. is supported by NSF grant AST01-0626.

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Published - Egami_2003_AJ_125_1038.pdf

Submitted - 0212175.pdf

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Created:
August 22, 2023
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March 5, 2024